Contentions

Well, that didn’t take long. I expected the liberal response to Paul Ryan’s budget proposal to be essentially demagogic. And that has proven to be the case. Peter has already pointed out that Dana Milbank is outraged over the fact that Republicans are doing now what he was outraged they were not doing two months ago—reforming entitlements. Or consider the editorial in today’s New York Times:

The plan would condemn millions to the ranks of the uninsured, raise health costs for seniors and renege on the obligation to keep poor children fed. It envisions lower taxes for the wealthy than even George W. Bush imagined: a permanent extension for his tax cuts, plus large permanent estate-tax cuts, a new business tax cut and a lower top income tax rate for the richest taxpayers.

The Times doesn’t analyze Ryan’s proposal, or even lay out its specific ideas; it merely anathematizes them. You can practically see the editorial board hauling out their garlic and crucifixes to ward off the dreaded conservative vampire that wants—run for your lives!—to reduce marginal rates on the rich. The Times, of course, doesn’t have the intellectual honesty to tell its readers that the reduced rates would be balanced by closing the loopholes that allow the rich and corporations to evade the higher marginal rates the Times would so love to impose.

The New York Times editorial page, once by far the most influential in the country, is now, when it comes to fiscal matters, nothing more than the primary branch from which the liberal parrot endlessly squawks, “Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Arrrrrk! Tax the rich!”